Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @11:09AM
from the wasn't-that-ship-date dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Gartner is saying it's time to plan your migration now (if you havent already done it). I for one know my company still has loads of users still on XP, citing training costs (time and money) rather than software license fees. Is my company alone in wanting to stay in the 1990s or is Windows 7 the way forward?"

Mods, please explain how a first post can possibly be "Redundant"? Extra credit if you can explain this as something other than censorship, since the OP actually has a valid point that applies to TFS...

I work at a company that every reader of slashdot would know, and we are still using XP in the development environment. I suppose that Microsoft would have to stop supporting Visual Studio 2008 on XP to force this organization off of XP and onto 7.

Vista is loaded on the 'corporate' PC but XP is on the development PC. XP works, it's stable. End of story.

Vista is loaded on the 'corporate' PC but XP is on the development PC. XP works, it's stable. End of story.

Should I have to use or admin your products, all I care about is that you actually know how to develop for Vista or later and that your product follows its security model and conventions.

There are plenty of apps developed for Vista and 7 that do obnoxious shit like default putting downloaded files in ~\Documents\Downloads. For fuck's sake, there's ~\Downloads for that, and it works quite nicely. Yes, I'm looking at you,Chrome. Smart enough to avoid UAC by installing into AppData, but ignorant and audacious enough to break the much improved home folder in the same stroke.

If an app did that on Linux or OS X, people would pitch a fit... especially the developers.

Wow...so, did Vista and 7 get Unix style folders?!?! No more C: drive and the like?? Cool, I'll have to check that out!

Both yes and no.

You have been able to use slashes in file paths since DOS 1.0. All Win32 APIs that take filenames understand them. All GUI applications do, too (try navigating to e.g. C:/Users in Explorer and see what happens).

Command-line tools do as well, but the problem there is that leading "/" is also treated as an indicator to start a command-line option, and furthermore, as an option separator. So if you write dir/foo/bar, this will be parsed as argv[1]="/foo", argv[2]="/bar" to begin with, and then those will be treated as options (unrecognized, so you'll get an error) rather than paths. If you put quotes around it, however - e.g. dir "/foo/bar" - this will be properly interpreted as a path.

(As a side note, you can thank IBM [msdn.com] for this whole mess; when DOS has got directories, it was supposed to use "/" for paths and "-" for options, as God and K&R intended.)

PowerShell disposes with all this, and uses "-" only for options, so it will never misinterpret a Unix-style path. Of course, it also understands "/" as a path separator (though will still show "\" for NTFS and registry in paths that it itself outputs). It also understands "~" as a shortcut for home directory, and expands variables with "$...", not DOS-style "%...%".

Disk letters are still there, but can be largely ignored if desired. You'll still need one for your root, but everything else can be mounted in directories underneath it, including any removable drives, USB sticks etc. At this point, you can also start omitting it in all paths you input, and always start them with "\" (or "/"), since the current drive will always be the only one in the system.

Win7 just works. It's stable. It's faster and feature-rich and up-to-date. It has a lot of great short-cuts and productivity enhancers in the UI. End of story.

That's what so many IT pro's don't understand about Vista and 7. They install it and immediately turn a bunch of new features off and revert to the "Classic" Start menu.

Meanwhile, while they're hunting for an application buried deep inside some terrible folder hierarchy that stretches across the whole screen, I tap the Windows key, type the first three letters of an Application name, hit enter, and I'm there. Meanwhile, my colleagues whine about the lack of an "Up" button while I just click the back button on my mouse or the folder name in the breadcrumb bar.

I call the classic start menus and such "I fear change" mode. Fitting, I think:D

Yes but it was also sarcastic so he could have been shooting for funny. and now he's stuck with informative and crying in his coffee, once again misunderstood by a cruel world that never comprehends his jests.

I'm not sure if you've ever had experience supporting people, either over the phone or in person, but a surprisingly large number of people immediately lock up and scream for help if anything the least bit out-of-place happens. Maybe a Word toolbar gets rearranged somehow, or they accidentally move an icon somewhere, or their Big Project drops off the Recently Used list... stuff like that utterly stops workflow. The concept of fumbling around, trying stuff out, or otherwise figuring it out is a foreign concept since they're still in the camp of fearing they're going to break it or get a "virus" somehow.

You can argue they're unemployable, but I'd hazard to say even a majority of the average non-technical office workers are like this. Now throw in Windows 7 and IE8, and suddenly there's a lot of little differences they'll have to learn and/or get used to. Maybe throw Office 2007/2010 with the ribbon in if perhaps they were still using an old version of Office as well. I do tend to think the fear and cost is overstated, but you can't discount it entirely either.

While I agree that most of the marketing and Aero-fluff is useless, there are a few very big improvements I have to point out with Windows 7:
-Security is MUCH better than XP. I'm not calling it *nix level or anything, but it is much better. I've seen a huge decrease in spyware infections on Win 7.
-Bitlocker is secure, fast and accessible for most users. Again, Truecrypt may be better, but this is a good thing for the OS to have native.
-The systems management functions (i.e. power settings controlled by GPO, proper grouping of the event logs, etc) are far superior in Windows 7. I would much rather manage 1000 Win 7 desktops than 250 XP.

I had the same problem. It was "open source crap". So I did the natural thing. I installed it on the prettiest employee's desktop and within a week of her lauding this "Audacity thing" there were official requests to install it on any desktop that had to manipulate audio. We would be on Asterisk by now if she hadn't left.

My primary role is programming mail merge documents while maintaining all of the document templates we use within Siebel. My secondary role is maintaining validation documentation for new database releases.

How large is your organization?

The company as a whole has over 10,000 employees internationally. Our specific business unit, however, is only about 600 people.

How many folks are working in IT?

In our business unit, we have about 20 IT people, not including help desk folks. Company wide, we have literally hundreds of IT employees.

I suspect they are starving the IT department to keep the company afloat,and WinXP SP2 and IE6 may be the most recent they can get from MS - you may not have software that passes Microsoft Genuine Advantage, making IE8 (or maybe even IE7) and SP3 unavailable to you...

Last year, the company netted $1.8 billion in revenue ($106 million of which came directly from our business unit). That was the best year ever for both the company and our business unit (in fact, our unit won an award for highest year-over-year percentage increase in both income and profit). I think we can afford to upgrade our computers.

what the hell does this mean?"My primary role is programming mail merge documents while maintaining all of the document templates we use within Siebel. My secondary role is maintaining validation documentation for new database releases."

you send spam?

I'll start with the mail merge.

Our particular business unit is a pharmaceutical call center. Patients contact us when they have questions regarding their medication. We also provide Patient Assistance Programs, conduct Insurance Verifications, and also assist in claim denials. Obviously, there are a lot of forms associated with this work. My job is to design these forms based on our clients needs (our clients tend to be Pharmaceutical companies), and then program them with the necessary code to pull demographic information, therapy information, diagnosis, and dosage from our database (filled with data that has been provided by patients or doctors over the phone so that patients and physician's don't have to fill out the whole form manually. Everything we submit is explicitly requested by a patient, physician, or medical office. Our business unit receives around 20,000 calls per day and makes around 12,000 calls per day.

We have enough trouble keeping up with stuff that is actually requested, we wouldn't have the time or resources to send out unsolicited documentation even if we wanted to.

Validation Documentation is the process of ensuring that our final testing of new database releases matches what our release plan was, making sure our release plan matches our functional design, and making sure our functional design matches our requirements. Basically, it's a glorified way of saying "making sure we don't miss anything we intended to build into our monthly Siebel releases." It's simple but essential work in case we have to retrace our steps due to database errors after modifications are made to the system.

I would live to migrate on of my offices to Windows 7, but then they would need to buy all-new hardware, sinc ewhat they have will not support Windows 7.
Also, they use an old version of Navison Axapta (since renamed to Microsoft Dynamics AX) which has issues on newer OS versions.

The reason I'm not getting 7 is because.... I already have an XP license which works perfectly fine on my 6 year old P4. It's not exactly cheap to upgrade, since you say: "Just get more RAM". Assuming you want 2GB RAM, with a typical machine having 2 or 3 DDR memory slots, thus needing 2 sticks of 1GB at about 35.99$/piece (Quick search on newegg.com, you might find better deals).

Add in the license for Windows 7 (Upgrade is out, because you're on XP).... 99.99$ for the Systems Builders 32-bit version (source: also newegg)...

Another example of why companies like Gartner are useless. They're little more another source of advertising for computer companies.

Your decisions on your OS should be driven by your needs first and foremost. If XP is still supported, and it's doing the job well for you... why switch? Switch if YOU need to, not because someone like Gartner says "Hey you, get out of the past and get with the future. All the cool kids are running *insert OS here*"

If XP is still supported, and it's doing the job well for you... why switch?

The problem is, at 9 years old, XP won't be supported for very much longer. Any responsible company should be looking at a migration plan, identifying legacy apps that need to be updated, and starting up projects to do so. Companies have a bad habit of waiting until the last minute to figure this stuff out and then end up being forced to run old out of support software because they didn't give sufficient time or resources to updating their legacy internal apps that won't work right on the new platform. This is how we end up with so many companies still using IE6.

Do not write large applications in microsoft languages for microsoft operating systems.

We are going to hardware and operating system agnostic packages in a big way.

For the problem software tho, it's going to be a rough road until the packages are rolled out (and that will take a couple years). At any point, our current software could be killed by an arbitrary microsoft patch since the language (vb6) is out of support.

For the problem software tho, it's going to be a rough road until the packages are rolled out (and that will take a couple years). At any point, our current software could be killed by an arbitrary microsoft patch since the language (vb6) is out of support.

VB6 IDE is not supported now (though a paid support agreement with MS is possible). It also has known compat problems with Vista and above. That said, it works perfectly in XP Mode under Win7.

VB6 runtime is a part of Windows 7, and will be supported for at least as long as Win7 itself is supported. So, no, an "arbitrary patch" won't kill your software.

The VB6 crap is a stand alone application. It took a dozen programmers about 2 years to write it. It's big. It does a lot. And, I've had to manage projects for updating it so I can say it has a pretty good design.

When the decision was made to go with VB back in 1999, it was reasonable to assume there would be a VB7 which would mean it would take a few months to rewrite it.

Instead we got.Net and no upgrade path.

So this means it would again take half dozen programmers another 2 years to rewrite it (half

I've been in this software business for twenty seven years, and one thing I've learned is timing is everything. You gets tons of people trying to make money doing something, then the person who gets a good enough product out at the right time -- not too early, not too late -- wins the prize.

The same goes for upgrading. Vendors want to you to upgrade ASAP, especially if there's revenue involved. If you listened to them, you'd upgrade too early. But you can also upgrade too late. Here's how you know you've got the timing right: nothing much happens. What? I go through all that pain in the ass for nothing much to happen?

Yes. Exactly so.

The vendors do not have a solution to all your problems. They're peddling software updates. So you're a fool upgrading early to achieve IT Nirvana. But you're equally a fool to wait until your hand is forced, and you have to meet heaven and Earth to do multiple years of updating in a single quarter, disrupting the operation of your employers and leaving users in a world of unfamiliar user interfaces.

Lack of drama is the hallmark of competency. Each quarter looks more or less like the last one, with no notable emergencies or sudden "improvements" that leave people with allegedly powerful but unfamiliar tools. You can't do that if you wait until your hand is forced.

We're coming up on the one year anniversary of Windows 7. For Windows XP shops, this is a good time to start planning a transition that will be done before this time next year.

Absolutely agree with you on this, except that you will have to convince all your software suppliers to create a version of their software for Linux, or you will have to find other software for the employees at your pretty big business to do their job.

Unless all they are using is MS Office that you can replace with OO, you're gonna have the hell of a time finding equivalent software, but in the end, it might pay. Or be painful.

I would tend to agree but in today's offices there really is not a lot of specialty software. 99.9% of the users use office, e-mail, chat, and a very small list of other common apps. Heck, where I am now, the accounting and other custom application are all run on HPUX or Solaris systems and the people open a terminal to the remote server to access them. It was done because it costs less to manage the apps that way, no need to distribute them to the desktops, etc.

Maybe I am wrong and smaller companies pay to have custom apps written for the desktop or maybe small companies are using custom apps to do stuff. Dont know, all the companies I have worked for in the last 15 years are Fortune 500.

Your Fortune 500 company most likely doesn't have retail/OEM Windows XP licenses - they ar emost likely under "Software Advantage" and pay a per-desktop licesne fee for a number of MS apps per year. It is more economical if you turn your desktop operating system or MS applications over every three years.

They pay a license fee each year (software maint.) - do you really imagine a Fortune 500 company can just 'migrate off Win XP' incurring only "t

The problem with XP is not that it'snot perfectly satisfactory but that it's not maintained. New software won't be written for it. That's the reason to migrate.

On the other hand one could make a lateral move. Linux is more like XP in feel than even Win 7 is. And software is in production for Linux. So perhaps a lateral move is not so unthinkable in terms of training costs at this particular point in time.

- Office software compatibility... we standardize on OpenOffice.org and have been pleasantly surprised that it is more compatible with MS Office than all of the various MS Office versions are with each other.

- other software... we have been pleasantly surprised that we have been able to find good quality software for everything we need. We were worried about the FUD about open source software but haven't had any problems. We have been pleasantly surprised with the quality and availability of Office, Web, eMail, graphics, video, audio, utility, etc. software. We have found everything we need. We don't have any legacy applications tied to XP or IE6.

- powerful unix utilities... we have also been pleasantly surprised to discover a wealth of powerful genuinely useful unix utilities such as rsync, dd, grep, etc. which have made our lives much easier.
- training has been a minor expense... this is just not a problem... most people can transfer their Windows skills without problems or a simple introduction.

Holes found and fixed. Mac and Linux are not impervious to malware, they just have a much higher level of resistance due to the Unix security model... and a much more vigilant community to fix problems promptly. I don't have the illusion that I am completely secure against malware but I do have a high level of confidence that I have a secure system. This is the opposite of Windows where I assume that the systems are compromised and insecure.

Really? OK, I posted earlier about all the reasons that moving to *nix from Windows is hard, but, well, these are none of them. Every problem you list has at least one often more solutions in the Unix world:

File sharing: Several options. Assuming all Unix machines, NFS is by far the easiest. As long as all users are authenticating off the same directory their UIDs will match between systems. This is the "go to" Unix file sharing system, but there's other options. You can use Samba of course, and there's a few nifty distributed file systems out there that are starting to get mature. The first two options will work on any Unix system including Macs. The distributed solutions are spottier in what they support, being often new.

Centralized Login: Two major solutions. LDAP and NIS+. LDAP is by far the more modern and and scalable, though it can be slightly tricky to set up. Very slightly, nothing any half competent admin can't figure out. Original NIS is also an option, but is getting long in the tooth and has some security problems. Macs are perfectly capable of using LDAP, and I assume NIS as well, though I've never tried

Policy management: This is a little less defined in the Unix world than it is in Windows, but still manageable. Most of these policies are managed by various text files in Unix, so what I typically do is run a script when I first install them to set everything the way I want it. In the unlikely event I need to make a change I just change one system and propagate it to all the others. I have a script that copies a file where ever it needs to go on every machine in the network. You can also automate this through rsync though I've never personally bothered to set this up. I've never run a network complicated enough to really need it. The hard part here is if you have a heterogeneous Unix environment, since nearly all Unix's insist on using different files and different syntax to manage this stuff. I'll admit this is a slightly weak area, but definitely manageable.

Update Management: It's trivial to setup a local repository for any *nix repository system I am aware of. Setup you client to update to the local repository and test updates before you put them on the repo server.

Mostly this stuff is trivial in Unix/Mac environments. When I manage heterogeneous networks my problem is usually getting the Windows boxes to play nice with everyone else. Unix and Mac machines will all happily share files and directory data with each other, even across different OS's and hardware platforms, while the Windows boxes insist on playing their own little game. Samba helps with file sharing, but getting everyone to log in against the same network shared directory is an undertaking and a half.

Just to get the ball started... yes, I agree... it is time to dump Windows XP and change to OS X or one of the BSDs or heck, even one of the mature Linux distributions like Ubuntu.Moderators: start your engines... am I Flamebait, or am I Insightful? Informative or Offtopic?

Wine runs a surprising number of Windows applications, including Microsoft Office. But it still doesn't run everything, especially intranet web applications that rely on IE 6 and/or ActiveX. It especially doesn't run drivers for specialized peripherals or for some hardware that might be in a company's existing, paid-for PCs.

God no, you're not alone. We need stable environments for consistency of software development. We have a dozen home-grown tools, and 2x that from open source type things, and jumping service patches is a holy pain, much less an entire OS. We were still supporting Win2k machines until two years ago.

At my small office workplace we are down to one remaining Windows 2000 computer, majority XP, no Vista, and one Windows 7. It was a pain to convert our roaming desktops from 2k/XP style to Vista/7 style (samba server). I personally really like Windows 7 though it of course comes with the assortment of upgrading pains and things that make you slap your forehead and say "WHY?!" -- example, out of the box Windows 7 runs a maintenance task that deletes broken shortcuts. Unfortunately for whatever reason it believes shortcuts to documents and programs on our network shares are broken, and so they repeatedly disappeared until we figured that out. Why can't I pin a network share/document/application to the start bar? etc

We also have an OS9 computer that doesn't get used often anymore (though did up until about 3 months ago), OSX 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6.

Why upgrade if it still works? (of course barring any major security vulnerabilities that can't be protected against)

I like Windows 7 a lot as well. I work for a cloud software company, and as a non-developer who had used prerelease versions of 7, I upgraded my machine as soon as it came out. Display hotplugging magically started working properly, and the Aero Snap feature is like a useful version of Tile from 3.1. The only issue I have is related to the Cisco VPN client, but that's because we won't pay to upgrade to the latest version.

Having spent the XP-Vista era in the Mac and Linux world, I was pleasantly surprised wi

Same at my company. Given that we use largely Web-based applications, there is no cost for porting apps to Win7 (if necessary at all); the only external cost would be to retire a few older printer that we tested as not working with Win7. However, with the few Win7 machines we have, we experienced two problems:

Retraining for Win7 is prohibitive, from a production perspective. We can't afford people to be idle for a day or two. (This also assumes converting from Office 2003 to Office 2007, which eats up most of the retraining costs

Anti-piracy controls on Win7 are far from perfect. We have only three machines with Win7, and yet we experienced a total of four times so far a black background and a screen that our product key was invalid. A call to Microsoft has always solved the issue, but it's still a hassle.

My company is ready to migrate once our vendor applications are compatible with Win7. Some won't run. Some haven't been verified by the company to work and our company won't move forward till the bendor says it's ok. Some are web apps that won't work with IE8. They will work in compatibility mode but once again, unless the vendor signs off on that and agrees that they won't corrupt our database or lack features doing such, management does not want to move forward. We're also a hospital and healthcare if involved directly so we don't want to beta test anything. We'd like to move forward to 64 bit Win7, but until ALL the applications we use can, we have to stick with WinXP because they are all used together on the same machines.

For the record, nobody ever considered Vista. Not us. Not the vendors.

It's easy to say well, upgrade your 1 Gig RAM 2 GHz P4 desktop to 2 Gig of RAM, but if you have to pitch 2x 512 Meg sticks and buy 2x 1 Gig PC3200 sticks it can get expensive fast. And that IDE drive will suffice, but it won't be very speedy - an upgrade may be in order, but unless your desktop includes a SATA port, will it really be cost-effective? Oh, and you can toss in a ReadyBoost USB flash drive to improve performance, but this is starting to get expensive...

PC3200 RAM is about $40-50 a Gig, a 4 Gig ReadyBoost USB flash drive will cost another $10 and where does that leave you? With an investment of $100/desktop plus labor in performing the hardware upgrade, or half the price of a new low-end Dell OptiPlex which will blow the socks off the 5-7 year old P4 you are investing in.

OR you could just sit on WinXP boxes for another year and start saving up for a forklift upgrade next year...

The main reason, in my mind, to upgrade is being able to effectively use 64-bit machines fully--and have more than 4GB of RAM.

Yes you need new machines to do this, but really, if you are buying NEW machines, you should probably upgrade. The question then becomes a matter of whether or not new machines are worthwhile. Your old machines may be still serviceable, but would newer machines result in getting work done enough faster to offset (even partially) the cost of the upgrade.

In many cases, the answer is no--a LOT of secretaries & folks that mainly do word processing are better off just staying where they are--their machines are fast enough for what they do, and additional RAM & extra cores aren't going to make a difference.

That said, if you are doing statistical analysis, engineering, graphic design, programming (and compiling), and a number of other jobs, then you should ABSOLUTELY be on a very aggressive upgrade schedule. Additionally, 8GB of RAM is more than just a good idea for many of those jobs--some of them should be stuffing as MUCH memory as they can into their machines so that they can do their jobs more efficiently.

In any work setting the bottleneck for employee performance should not be the environment or resources, but rather human capacities. That's the ideal. Obviously cost of achieving that and other considerations prevent most companies from getting to the point where that's true--but it should be the goal.

So either move to Win7-x64 OR move to another 64-bit OS with lots of power & memory in the hardware. Staying where you are only makes sense if you are doing mostly word processing.

The main reason, in my mind, to upgrade is being able to effectively use 64-bit machines fully-

This. The main reason to upgrade to Win7 is for 64-bit. Unfortunately, it's also the main reason to put off upgrading. While we haven't had too many issues with software and 64-bit (though there are some), the main problem has been with peripherals. In our IT shop, none of the PC card or USB NICs that we had have a Win7 64-bit driver. Only one of our USB to Serial adapters has a 64-bit driver. A customer has handheld scanners for their warehouse -- no 64-bit driver. Same issues with printer drivers.

Another editor writes an idiotic title??
Let's answer this simply, since the article has a simple title: "Is it finally time to dump XP?" NO. It's 2010. By your own article's admission support ends in 2014!

FTFA: "IT departments need to dump Microsoft's Windows XP operating system (OS) before the software vendor ends support for it in April 2014"
Thanks, Capt. Obvious!
Also FTFA: "the sooner the better as many new versions of applications are not expected to support XP beyond 2012."
What applications? Do these people live in the enterprise? Vendor apps are the slowest to migrate to any new OS. That's one of the major reasons why migrations happen so slowly. The other is money. In a down economy you're simply not going to see wholesale adoption of Windows 7 when there's no funding and companies can pull profits from apps that are working now! This is all fun to sit and talk about and kick up some worry but the reality is when you go back to your CIO or IT manager funding will win out. They're going to wait till they get closer to EOL and hope the economy turns around and frankly that's what they should do.

No, seriously. What killer new features does Windows 7 have that are worth the time and expense of an upgrade from XP? The only one I've heard mentioned, that it sucks less than Vista, doesn't apply to XP users.

When it gets down to it, there are two main reasons to upgrade to Windows 7: Eventually, it will become impossible to get new machines running XP. And Microsoft really wants your money. Neither of these benefits the user.

I've upgraded one machine to W7. Don't see much of a reason to upgrade the other. Aside from a few minor improvements, there really isn't all that much in W7 that is compelling. And in all the things that matter to me - user friendliness, software available, performance, in that order - it is just as bad as the other crap out of Redmond.

Yes, MS has put in incentives - IE8 (which I don't use), DX10/11 (which really doesn't make all that much of a difference so far) and probably a couple oth

When XP is no longer getting security updates (and its not that far out) everyone install the latest LTS Ubuntu. Set up an XP theme for users resistant to visual change.

Then, for any business-essential application that requires Windows, use Citrix, RDP or VNC to some secured XP boxes. Or, use VirtualBox or VMware. You can set the VMs to use specfic MAC addrs then set the DHCP server to not assign those an internet gateway, so they can't get on the intERnet, but they can still use the intRAnet. This way your users can still use the internet but not risk infection of XP machines.

OpenOffice is usable, but the.DOC and Access DB base still represents a migration problem.

It may be possible to use CodeWeaver's Crossover office ($40) to get Office to work where you have to. However I expect the reduced support costs to pay dividends, as well as not having to upgrade hardware. It now takes XP 14 minutes to boot on a (3-year-old) dual-core laptop. Ubuntu starts in 60 seconds, and that is to a "usable" desktop.

Other things that Ubtunu beats windows on:- centralized updater. Only one update service runs for the whole system.- no viruses

I've really been amazed at the latest Ubuntus - as easy to use as Windows - no - in fact easier.

I'll always keep a copy of XP around, but it will be a virtual machine that I keep between my linux upgrades and it won't have internet access, so I don't have to worry about viruses.

I'd cite the same reason business will give: "Give me a single business reason to migrate. Tell me what Windows 7 will do for me that Windows XP isn't doing for me today.". Note: "XP's being EOL'd." is a very weak business reason. The primary benefit's to the vendor, my only benefit is ending up exactly where I started. Various features of Windows 7 itself aren't good business reasons either. I don't run Windows for it's own features, I run it for the applications I use every day that need Windows underneath them to run. "But your applications aren't going to support XP anymore, you have to upgrade Windows to run them." also isn't a very good business reason, again it's arguing that I need to spend a lot of money and time and effort getting right where I already am today. It's also circular, because my application vendors are going "Microsoft isn't supporting XP anymore, so you're going to have to upgrade to new versions of the applications that'll run on Windows 7.".

Now, "Windows 7 provides better security and you won't have as many problems with malware." might be a better business reason. Still weak, but better. But it'll get me to thinking: what makes me think Windows 7 really will be any better? Many of the vulnerabilities in Windows come not from Windows but from things like Internet Explorer and Outlook. I can eliminate many of them by just not having those things around, by using Firefox and Thunderbird and the like instead. Except, oh look, I can't because Microsoft doesn't allow me to remove IE. It's always there, it's always active and it's always used for certain things. And Windows 7 doesn't change that. Other vulnerabilities are caused by things like Windows' file-sharing capabilities. Except, why are my desktops even sharing files? They aren't network file servers, they've no business even having the ability to give other machines network access to their filesystems at all. Except that Windows won't let me turn that service off without crippling Windows itself, and Windows 7 doesn't change that. So why am I spending time and effort upgrading to a version of Windows that has the same basic vulnerabilities built into it's design that my existing one does, as opposed to say spending that effort convincing my application vendors to support an OS where I can completely remove the things I don't need and not have to worry about whether there's vulnerabilities in them anymore?

I'll probably have to migrate this year as a purely technical matter, because support won't be there and I can't afford not to have security updates and AV support. But it won't be because I'm deriving any real benefit from the upgrade, it'll be because a vendor needs more upgrade revenue and is in a position to twist my arm. And as a pure business matter I'm going to be looking seriously at ways to get that vendor out of a position where he can twist my arm anymore, because it's just not good business to be at someone else's mercy.

The question of migration is not about staying in the 90's. Ask yourself this, "If it were your money, what would you do?". Your answer would probably be, if you were a successful business, you would look at the cost-benefit of the switch. So, citing training costs is a factor. Another factor might be whether you develop application that run on Windows, or do you just use Windows as development platform at all, or just a casual Business user? In the end, if the switch will cost you (the company) thousands of dollars and you gain nothing, surely you would not want to switch because Microsoft is forcing the switch. From a training perspective, one would want to push off the switch for as long as possible to allow the market (end users) to get the familiarity with the new Windows and Office on their home PCs so that training is minimal at the work place. If you personally upgrade your home PC, which a lot of people will do, and use it for a year or three, when your Office does the switch it (the new Windows) will be old hat, and that means less training on the company dime.

Our migration is probably similar to many other companies. Here's what we're doing in case anyone is curious how this roadmap looks in a reasonably sized company (multilocation, etc, etc):

1. We got our first Win7 system to test a few months ago. We discovered almost everything worked, but our VPN clients should be updated, our AV needed some updating, and really we should be on Office 2010. The nice thing there is we can eradicate Office 2003 once and for all.

2. So, that really prompts some server upgrades that we've been planning for a while anyway. We're going to consolidate a lot of servers onto VM'ed boxes. Most of our stuff (was) running Server 2003, with the exceptions of our domain controllers which we updated to 2008 last year. Exchange 2010 (from 2003) was planned for a while, so we pulled the trigger on that one. That also prompts an upgrade of BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) from 4.1 to 5.0. Our asset tracking also needed some attention in order to make sure we don't populate it with garbage when new machines arrive. We're hoping to have Exchange completely migrated by the end of July using a slow migration tactic instead of cutting over in the middle of the night. The goal here is to leave some app servers on 2003 until the new version of MS's server platform comes out, then update to that on an application by application basis.

3. So.. that means there's a fair amount of work to do before we want to consider replacing the user machines. I suspect most companies are in that boat. I think most companies are itching to replace XP - it's getting pretty tough to maintain these days and pretty outdated. Plus, no (sane) company actually upgrades machines from XP to Win7 - you transition to Win7 when your leases expire or you need to purchase a new desktop/laptop. Upgrading is in no way cost effective. Therefore, based on a lifecycle of 3 - 4 years per machine, we'll see XP still being used for 2 - 3 years at least for light duty.

Now, the really crazy part? Most suppliers are pushing 32-bit Win7. That means the 32-bit legacy is going to continue to haunt us when we could have transitioned to Win64.

Cost is usually rather low on the reasons for wanting to stay with Windows XP. There is an increasing amount of Microsoft phobia in business lately... at all levels. Moving to a "newer" Microsoft product used to bring cheers from the users. Now it brings groans. Why? Lately, it seems, Microsoft has been dumping far too much change on users and it is a burden. To this day, I STILL don't know how to find my way around Office 2007 and now there is Office 2010?!

And in a business sense, change can be expensive. There is downtime, re-training/re-learning, and the cost of mistakes that happen more often when big changes occur. (Almost no one ever cites the potential cost of mistakes during a migration... they can be quite costly at times.)

In addition, in specialty environments (e.g., some manufacturing shops), you're often constrained by what your other software vendors and equipment providers will support. A number of our key tools (e.g., 3D CAD) support Windows 7, but we have many legacy tools that only run on XP (or earlier environments!). In some cases, vendors are only supporting newer OSes if we also upgrade the machines that are tethered to the workstations--that means it's not as simple as buying a new PC and a new version of software, but instead could mean a $200,000.00 investment in a manufacturing device that will again be tethered to a specific build of Windows.

If someone needs to be trained to use Windows 7 then there is something wrong with them.

I have a PhD in computer science and still use XP (when I'm not using Linux) because of the "training costs" of migration. Am I going to go take a class on Windows 7? No. But it's annoying and time-consuming to hunt around for things and figure out how they're done now, set up all the network printer connections again, etc., when I could be getting stuff done, or posting to slashdot:) After switching to Office 2007 about 1 1/2 years ago, I am now accustomed to it, but I *still* don't see what I gained by migrating to the Ribbon interface and re-learning where to find everything. If anything, I still think it's *less* productive than the previous straightforward menu system augmented by toolbars.

You might argue I'll have to migrate eventually so why not now. In the case of Windows 7 that's true, but I did skip Vista entirely and am very glad I did.

Again, I am not against keeping up with technology and retraining myself but only when there is a benefit to doing so.

Every time someone talks about how great XP is working, I have this odd compulsion to point out the Linux equivalent.

If you ran Linux systems that old, you would be using a 2.4.18 kernel (remember LinuxThreads?). You would be using OSS, because ALSA was still incomplete and PulseAudio hadn't come around yet. Your system's compiler would be gcc-2.95, your python implementation would be 1.5.x and run none of today's code, you would still be on an XFree86 server that doesn't support any graphics card made after ~2004. Your web browser would be Mozilla, because Firefox hadn't come around yet (and today's Firefox doesn't support kernels that old). Your OpenSSL libraries would have started at version 0.9.6b, and been patched roughly twice a year since release.

The odd thing is, were this Linux you would be flamed for trying to get modern things running with such old versions. But as this is Windows, you feel entitled to complain about having to re-learn something new and brag about the "effort" you save.

As somebody who programs for both Linux and Windows for a living - your "saved effort" comes at a significant cost to me. It is increasingly hard to write Windows software that works on both XP and Win7; every new feature has to be written twice, once using the right Vista+ API and once to degrade gracefully on XP. Linux is marginally better - there's a new trendy library-of-choice every few years, but at least old ones disappear before too long. Hardware tends to be less than 5 years old, Linux installs tend to be less than 5 years old; yet tech-savvy XP users somehow feel entitled to stay with a 9-year-old OS. Most people don't keep cars that long; why expect an operating system to last?

The odd thing is, were this Linux you would be flamed for trying to get modern things running with such old versions. But as this is Windows, you feel entitled to complain about having to re-learn something new and brag about the "effort" you save.

Actually there is a huge difference. For me, a primary motivation for updating linux is getting driver support for new devices. On windows, the stable driver abi and supply of 3rd party drivers means XP supports everything on my laptop, even though it came out years after XP was released.

As for python and Mozilla, you don't need the latest kernel to run those. (That's right, I don't update my linux kernel unless I have a specific need, either. Call me crazy).

To be fair, the old keyboard was a basic 101 key model, and the new one had some media control(start, stop, pause, little volume knob) buttons on it.

The user was informed, as politely as shock allowed, that the function of each key on the new keyboard was the same as that of the old, save for the additional keys, whose use was optional, and not required for the performance of any job-related function.

Hundreds of employees each spending 20+ minutes to figure out where the fuck the print button went in the new version of Office, for example. No, clicking on the ball in the top corner of the screen is not even close to intuitive, and no, there isn't anyone that actually clicks on the take a tour of $new_product to find these things out. Even if they did, multiply that half hour to hour of tour across an enterprise, and it is significant.

The ball isn't any more or less intuitive than why a picture of a floppy disk saves your document. It made sense once, but who uses floppies for saving documents nowadays? It's just become commonplace, much like "Exit" being under the "File" menu. Exiting the application has got absolutely nothing to do with the file.

That's why when you ran Office 2007 for the first time there was a huge bubble saying "This is the new Office Button. It has things like Save and Print in it."

The 7 taskbar is also very intuitive. If an application has more than one window open, you see a little stack of tiles. if you hover over the stack, you get a bunch of live previews of that application's windows.

Seriously, if you are so bad at using computers that you need training to go from the "number of windows and window list" of XP to "stack of tiles and window thumbnails", you are an automaton who can and probably should be replaced by someone younger and more mentally flexible.

If you are valuable enough for your non-computer skills, then your company should pay to send you to a week-long computer skills course at the local community center. Shouldn't cost more than $100.

Very intuitive? The Windows 7 taskbar is a massive productivity roadblock.

For example, imagine have multiple instances of the same application open and you wish to switch between instances. In XP each instance has its own button on the task bar (usually with the file you have open written on it) so you simply click on the instance you want. In Windows 7 there's only one button for each application so first you have to click that to bring up some pretty pictures. You then identify which instance you want

And places like Comcast did not migrate to it until the spring of 2006.

Here we are looking at Migrating AWAY from windows 7. We have had nothing but trouble with customer control hardware and device programming. It's probably due to using the 64 bit version of Windows 7 but Dell does not give you the option to select a 32 bit version with new laptops..

WE are downgrading field PC's to XP and office PC's are upgrading to Ubuntu with crossover office for Vertical Windows legacy apps. We switched to Open Of

Why is it time exactly? What benefit would most companies exactly get from upgrading? If everything works and there is no foreseeable change in the software that the business runs to conduct business, why spend hundreds of dollars per computer for a new OS and maybe some extra RAM to do exactly what they are doing now?

So that in a few years people don't arrive having never used XP and immediately start cursing at "this stupid system". Little things like the improved taskbar, the window snap and so on all work their way into how you interact and you suddenly feel lost without them.

Software isn't the problem, people who use 7 at home and don't want to go back to XP at work are.

That and the fact Vista and 7 don't support IE6. If the OS can't support it, IE6 is dead.

I think the current and recent moderator pool is from the newer users who are used to moderation on sites like reddit and digg where people tend to vote emotionally, and unused to slashdot's trend of promoting comments rather than demoting them.

It doesn't help matters any that the new(er) metamoderation system is completely unlike the old (working) system, and that metamoderation seems to do absolutely nothing these days...

Train for what?Can people not just figure out where they moved the buttons you click on to?

As someone who does IT/support for hundreds of computers daily, believe me when I say training is always an issue. People tend to memorize the exact steps necessary to complete a task, including the appearance and location of buttons. If an icon changes or a button gets moved, they don't try to intuit where it might have gone or look in menus that sound like they're related to the function they're looking for. Instead they react as if their world has been turned upside down, and they just give up and call for help.

. If an icon changes or a button gets moved, they don't try to intuit where it might have gone or look in menus that sound like they're related to the function they're looking for. Instead they react as if their world has been turned upside down, and they just give up and call for help.

Only because it means that they can sit around doing nothing for awhile.